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Rhetoric in Popular Culture, Fifth Edition, shows readers how to apply growing and cutting-edge methods of critical studies to a full spectrum of contemporary issues seen in daily life. Exploring a wide range of mass media including current movies, magazines, advertisements, social networking sites, music videos, and television shows, Barry Brummett uses critical analysis to apply key rhetorical concepts to a variety of exciting examples drawn from popular culture. Readers are guided from theory to practice in an easy-to-understand manner, providing them with a foundational understanding of the definition and history of rhetoric as well as new approaches to the rhetorical tradition. Ideal for courses in rhetorical criticism, the highly anticipated Fifth Edition includes new critical essays and case studies that demonstrate for readers how the critical methods discussed can be used to study the hidden rhetoric of popular culture.
Exploring style in a global culture In A Rhetoric of Style, Barry Brummett illustrates how style is increasingly a global system of communication as people around the world understand what it means to dress a certain way, to dance a certain way, to decorate a certain way, to speak a certain way. He locates style at the heart of popular culture and asserts that it is the basis for social life and politics in the twenty-first century. Brummett sees style as a system of signification grounded largely in image, aesthetics, and extrarational modes of thinking. He discusses three important aspects of this system—its social and commercial structuring, its political consequences, and its role as t...
Supports the argument that rhetoric needs to be conceptualized as the social function that influences and manages meaning Through history, rhetoric has been understood as the art of verbal influence. This art took various forms and was put to diverse uses. Rhetoric has usually been regarded as the kind of extended verbal disÂcourse found in the public speech, the essay, the letter, or belles lettres, a discourse often founded on reasoned argument in support of propositions. This conception of rhetoric as propositional, verbal text persisted through ages in which public controversy primarily took oral or written form: words spoken or committed to print. Issues were debated and decisions were...
Techniques of Close Reading is a brief, supplemental text that trains students in an ability to see what texts--be they written, oral, visual, or mediated--may be saying. Renown scholar and teacher Barry Brummett explains and explores the various ways to "read" messages (speeches, cartoons, magazine ads, etc.), teaching students the ability to see deeper levels of meaning and to share those insights with others. Techniques of Close Reading differs from other books in rhetorical criticism, textual analysis, or critical thinking by: - Focusing on the act and techniques of criticism rather than on schools of thought, grand theories, and specific methods, thus helping students to engage in the act of critical close reading in ways that are congenial to a wide range of methods (for that reason, it is highly adaptable to other texts currently in use that are focused on specific methods) - Explaining the relationships among theory, methods, and techniques of rhetorical criticism - Examining the ethics and risk of doing and reading rhetorical criticism via plenty of examples, figures, and exercises taken from everyday life
This volume of essays examines the ways in which sports have become a means for the communication of social identity in the United States. The essays included here explore the question, How is identity engaged in the performance and spectatorship of sports? Defining sports as the whole range of mediated professional sports, and considering actual participation in sports, the chapters herein address a varied range of ways in which sports as a cultural entity becomes a site for the creation and management of symbolic components of identity. Originating in the New Agendas in Communication symposium sponsored by the University of Texas College of Communication, this volume provides contemporary explorations of sports and identity, highlighting the perspectives of up-and-coming scholars and researchers. It has much to offer readers in communication, sociology of sport, human kinetics, and related areas.
Millions of people around the world are engaged in sports and games. This volume studies the ways in which engagement is performed in popular culture. We do not just watch football - we perform by being a fan. NBA players do not simply run up and down the court. Instead, on and off the court they perform certain roles, many informed by hip hop culture. Such performances are rhetorical: they manage attitudes, behaviors, and predispositions, influencing the distribution of power. Competitive hot dog eaters, bull riding, and Mexican wrestlers are some of the other sports and games covered by the contributors. The book is unique in bringing together the three themes of sports and games, performance, and the rhetoric of popular culture, and is relevant for both scholarly use and classroom adoption in courses ranging from sport and society, rhetoric, composition, persuasion and argument, and popular culture.
This book examines the relationship between rhetoric and public culture. Barry Brummett explores homologies between very different orders of experience and texts, such as battlefield experiences that are homologous to those at a dining room table. What these common patterns mean, why they are interesting, and why homology is rhetorical are the subjects of this study. ""Rhetorical Homologies " is an exceptionally well-crafted and -written work. Highly imaginative as well as at times provocative. . . . The individual studies in this text stand on their own as refined and sophisticated analyses of the relationship between rhetoric and public culture."--Raymie McKerrow, coeditor of "Principles and Types of Pubic Speaking "
Unmasking the social and political messages found in popular culture Sometimes movies, television shows, political speeches, and music lyrics seem to be about one thing on the surface but express other serious social and political issues when we examine them more closely. Using methods of formal analysis, Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics: Social Issues in Disguise offers students and scholars a key to unlocking hidden text that abounds in popular culture. Key Features Weaves meticulous analysis with popular culture throughout, keeping students and scholarly readers alike engaged and interested Empowers students to find hidden themes in texts of everyday life and inspires ongoing critical thinking Using a clear and engaging style and examples of well-known works makes formal analysis more accessible Intended Audience Interested scholars and upper-level undergraduate students enrolled in such courses as rhetoric and popular culture, contemporary rhetorical theory/criticism, media criticism, popular culture and mass communication, rhetorical methods, and so forth will find this compelling text an informative and delightful read.